Comments on: Assessing Gaza from an armchair in space

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 12:51:11 +0000

Mikel – great news, thanks for the update. If that’s the case, there shouldn’t be any problem about publishing in other formats?

Gav – PDFs seem to fall between two stools – not as much use as a paper map for the general user, and not as much use as a GIS for the specialist user. It’s great if somebody can make them more useful, but the only time I ever saw anybody working with a PDF file in that way was in Darfur, and it was pretty messy. I remain unconvinced….

p.s. Any similarity between blog designs is purely coincidental…

By: Gavin Treadgold

Gavin Treadgold — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 11:38:25 +0000

Not sure what you mean by a native format. Yes, the geopdf’s are produced from a GIS – they’re designed to given your average person on the ground a means of having readily packaged maps available to be view and manipulated in Acrobat (with the GeoPDF plugin). I read a while ago that this was being adopted in the military in the US, and also by the New South Wales (Australia) Emergency Services. PDF’s are, after all, quite good at rendering vector and raster data, so it was probably only a matter of time before something like this popped up. I agree that proper geospatial formats are best for the experts (due to projections, datums. symbology and all that fun stuff) but readily packaged electronic maps are needed in an easily digestable format. I’m not sure how much Keyhole Markup Language meets the portable and self-contained need?

PS nice theme for the blog by the way, it reminds me of mine

By: Mikel Maron

Mikel Maron — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 07:22:07 +0000

Paul — in case you didn’t see, posted UNOSAT’s damage assessment raw data from January 16(?) to the OSM wiki. (Though eventually, publishing directly on UNOSAT’s website seems preferred)

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Palestine_Gaza#UN

UNOSAT and OSM .. yes, we’re ready for that partnership. And any with UN agencies or NGOs or national mapping agencies.

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 13:07:34 +0000

Surely that’s only partly true? PDFs aren’t a native format – they have to be produced from a true GIS. So while TerraGo’s extension might be useful, I’d prefer to see PDFs disappear from map production entirely. I just can’t see that the benefits (easy to print – any others?) outweigh the costs (unwieldy and inflexible).

By: Gavin Treadgold

Gavin Treadgold — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:13:04 +0000

Paul - not all pdf's are useless from a mapping perspective. TerraGo have a proprietary extension to pdf that georeferences them, and makes geopdf a more reasonable means for producing useful maps in pdf format. I haven't followed the details of the technology much, but I understand that it is becoming increasining popular in the US military, and it can be better integrated into GIS software. Of course the real trick is turning it into a proper standards-based platform so it can be widely deployed. Only then would it be truely useful.